At the beginning of his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton introduces himself thus: “On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the border of Spain, I came into the ...

At six o’clock on a summer morning, the only sound outside the Trappist Abbaye Val Notre Dame is the croaking of two bull frogs in the nearby pond. The abbey, located deep inside the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains in southern Quebec, is so remote that when the monks began building, they had to forge ...

When the English novelist Evelyn Waugh visited the United States in the late 1940s, a young journalist asked him what impressed him most in America. His answer: the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Finding that his interviewer, whom he identified only as “the wretched girl”, knew nothing about the Trappists and little about anything ...

In May, 1964, Thérèse Vanier, a medical doctor in London, wrote to her parents that her brother, Jean, was “very busy over some new project which he may have mentioned to you—he only briefly said something to me about it—a plan to set up some sort of house or houses near Compiègne for des débiles ...

In late October, 1866, a young student and poet named Gerard Manley Hopkins boarded a train in Oxford and took the 60-mile journey north to the industrial city of Birmingham. There, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by John Henry Newman.
By that time, Newman had a saintly reputation. Once a renowned Anglican ...

In the chapel of St. Stephen’s Monastery, set high among the giant outcroppings of rock that stand before the Pindos Mountains in central Greece, the nuns’ chanting of Vespers goes on and on as evening turns into night. Their voices, singing in a minor key of mournful solemnity, become a drone, the unfamiliar sounds an ...

One day in early January 1945, Freya von Moltke walked through bomb-gutted Berlin to visit Roland Freisler, the judge-presider of the show-trials that had been set up after the July,1944 failed attempt on Hitler’s life. At the trials, the defendants had to stand before Freisler, some forced to hold up their pants because suspenders and ...

From a distance, the island of Patmos looks like lumps of clay. As the ferry draws nearer, turning into the deep bay toward the Port of Skala, the lumps dissolve into a volcanic, mountainous mass. Here and there clusters of square-topped houses, gleaming in whitewashed starkness, cling together. At the top of the second-highest mountain ...

The death mask of St. Ignatius Loyola, who died 450 years ago last year, is at once ghoulish and fascinating. A copy sits on a ledge inside the square, thick-walled castle where he was born near the Basque town of Azpeitia in northern Spain (the original death mask is in Rome). It captures perfectly the ...